http://www.star-telegram.com/389/story/456556.html

Posted on Wed, Feb. 06, 2008

Democrats seek criminal inquiry into waterboarding
By LARA JAKES JORDANThe Associated Press

GETTY IMAGES/ALEX WONG
Attending a Senate committee hearing Tuesday are, from left, FBI Director Robert Mueller, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden. WASHINGTON -- Senate Democrats demanded a criminal investigation into waterboarding by government interrogators Tuesday after the Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that the tactic was used on three terrorism suspects.

In congressional testimony Tuesday, CIA Director Michael Hayden became the first administration official to publicly acknowledge that the agency used waterboarding on detainees after 9-11.

Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years to the Spanish Inquisition and is condemned by nations worldwide.

"We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time," Hayden told the Senate Intelligence Committee. "There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al Qaeda and its workings. Those two realities have changed."

Hayden said Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003. Hayden banned the technique in 2006, but National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell told senators during the same hearing Tuesday that waterboarding remains in the CIA arsenal -- so long as it is at the specific consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general.

That prompted committee member Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to call on the Justice Department to open a criminal inquiry into whether past use of waterboarding violated any law. The Pentagon has banned its employees from using waterboarding to extract information from detainees, and FBI Director Robert Mueller said his investigators do not use coercive tactics in interviewing terrorism suspects.

Advocacy group Human Rights Watch, which has been calling on the government to outlaw waterboarding as torture, called Hayden's testimony "an explicit admission of criminal activity."

Al Qaeda

In his testimony, McConnell said al Qaeda, increasingly constrained in Iraq, is establishing cells in other countries as the terrorist organization uses Pakistan's tribal region to train for attacks in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa and the United States.

"Al Qaeda remains the pre-eminent threat against the United States," McConnell said.

He said that fewer than 100 al Qaeda terrorists have moved from Iraq to establish cells in other countries as the U.S. military clamps down on their activities and that the organization "may deploy resources to mount attacks outside the country."

The al Qaeda network in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan has suffered setbacks, the group poses a persistent and growing danger, he said.

The Pakistani tribal areas provide al Qaeda a haven similar to what it enjoyed in Afghanistan before the war but less securely and on a smaller scale, McConnell told the committee. It uses the area to "maintain a cadre of skilled lieutenants capable of directing the organization's operations around the world," he said.

Mueller, who testified alongside McConnell, said "homegrown terrorists" inspired by al Qaeda's propaganda on the Internet pose a threat as well.

McConnell agreed: "While the threat from homegrown extremists is greater in Europe, the U.S. is not immune."